Monday, June 12, 2006

No Joementum

The impending car crash that is Joe Lieberman political career has a kind of Dead Zone feel to it. Can his crash be averted, and will displacing Joe as the parties candidate have unforeseen consequences.It is not that I have any great love for Senator Lieberman. I do believe however that he is a good man whose party has moved beyond him.

Its not that Lieberman could ever be confused with a liberal, he may be a tad progressive but certainly not a liberal. He has always been a moderate to conservative Democrat, but that breed seems to be about as viable a species as a moderate Republicans.Party politics in the House and the grassroots, for both parties, have been moving further towards the fringes, those fringes are starting to become the mainstream. The Republicans of old, the Thomas B. Reeds and the Dwight Eisenhowers have been supplanted by the religious right and the demogogery of the neo con agenda. The Democrats have pulled steadily left with the Trumans and Clintons giving way to a more doctrinaire liberalism.

The net effect is to make moderates like the Areln Specters and Joe Lieberman looking archaic, spineless, and road blocks, for the wider agendas, of the new mainstream in each party. The days of triangulation seem to be finished encapsulated in that paragon of impotence the erstwhile "Gang of Fourteen". While my views fall definitely and firmly left of center, I worry that the mainstreaming of the "radical" factions of our two political parties erodes our democracy in some fundamental way.

The allusions some make, of our present political situation, to the political and economic confusion that was the Weimar Republic are fair and I, for the most part appropriate. I hope that we can pull back from that point of no return, that chasm the threatens to engulf the dreams of all Americans.

I could go on, but I won't. I could talk of the friends I have lost because they chose unshaking political ideology to friendship. I could mention the new friends I have made because of my ideology. The sad part is I am conscious enough to realize that those occurrences are a symptom of the disease not a cure. While typing this little missive the words of the great W.B. Yeats came to mind:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood dimm'd tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. W.B, YEATS